Reuters  
SAN FRANCISCO-Google Inc suffered a service outage that briefly took down Gmail, the email service used by hundreds of millions of people and many businesses across the globe.
Google, which first acknowledged the outage at 11:12 am Pacific Time, said a little over an hour later that the problem with Gmail had been resolved. As of late Friday, the company did not offer an explanation for the outage, which affected users in at least India, Britain and the United States and prompted a stream of complaints on Twitter from users in many more countries.
“We’re investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly,” the company said on its “App Status” dashboard online, which tracks the state of various Google services. Google Docs, the cloud-based productivity application that competes against Microsoft Corp’s Office suite, also suffered a service disruption, according to the Google dashboard.